


Virtue

by jmtorres



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-04
Updated: 2006-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:11:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmtorres/pseuds/jmtorres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A theory on the creation of homunculi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Virtue

The Amestrian registry of citizens states that a male child was born to a Xingian mother and a Drach father, both immigrants. Drach blood explains his complexion; Xingian blood explains his hair and eyes.

The records are half-right, Roy supposes. The man he counts as his father hails from the North.

\---

Roy's proper name is Fortitude, which he abhors. He once said it sounded like a gelded horse. He was raised in the country and is familiar with an entire stable of horses with names like Silver, Courage, Windrider, Bonnie Bess, and Champion.

Hohenheim, assuming it was the gelded part to which Roy so mightily objected, laughed and called him "Mustang," since no one gelds a feral horse. To Roy's suprise, it stuck.

\---

Roy Mustang is not like the others. There was no other before him, no template. He is not sure if this makes him worse or better than them. It gives him nothing to aspire to, but a great deal less to be bitter about.

If there were an opposite to aspiration (inhalation? exhalation?), a goal beneath oneself rather than above, Roy thinks he might possess it. Unfortunately, there is no opposite to aspiration.

\---

The Führer, Roy strongly suspects, knows full well what he is. Clairvoyance is, after all, his gift.

Hohenheim reassures him that it is highly unlikely that the Führer can tell what he _is_, even if he knows what he is not. It is far more likely that he that assumes Roy is like him, than realizes he is opposite.

\---

Roy burned through Tim Marcoh's red stones faster than anyone else in the army--burned through, he said, and everyone else said, but he didn't mean it in the sense they did.

Fire consumes, but it is not alive.

\---

Tim Marcoh is the only human being who knows what Roy is. Marcoh saw him pull the trigger, and what happened after.

Roy is not particularly surprised that Marcoh fled.

\---

The first time Roy received a letter from the Elric boys, he took it to Hohenheim and said, "Your sons are looking for you."

Hohenheim said, "They're better off without me."

Roy said, "Their mother is dead."

Hohenheim was still for a moment, then answered, "If she's already dead, there's nothing I can do."

\---

Roy Mustang is both more and less powerful than he is perceived.

These are the ways in which he is more powerful: He is perfectly capable of lighting a fire without a spark created by some natural means, and, like the Greeks, he can burn water.

This is the way in which he is less powerful: He told Maes the reason he didn't try to raise the dead was fear of his own death. He was lying.

\---

Roy thinks the sins are more human than Hohenheim gives them credit for, but then, Hohenheim likes to forget that humans, whole and soul and all, are capable of great atrocities on their own.

Roy fears that he is more human than Hohenheim hoped of him. The way Roy gauges how human he is, is by how tempted he is to sin.

\---

When Hughes dies, Roy thinks:

There is enough blood in me (and he means blood, but he doesn't; he means other men's blood, distilled to stone) to raise at least one man.

He thinks:

I would need an alchemist to activate the array, and Hohenheim won't do it, nor Fullmetal.

He thinks:

I wonder what sin he would be.

He thinks:

Can a virtue touch a sin without annihilating both? Or does the combination make them--merely human?

\---

_Fortitude_ is an extremity, an ideal beyond hope of achievement: fortitude is never giving up.

Roy wishes Hohenheim had named him _Temperance_: temperance is moderation in all things.

Roy thinks that humanity is the ultimate moderation between virtue and sin.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also archived on dreamwidth: http://jmtorres.dreamwidth.org/1127682.html


End file.
